Section 230 can be credited with creating today's Internet. Congress made the deliberate choice to protect online free speech and innovation, while providing discrete tools to go after culpable platforms. Section 230 provided the legal buffer entrepreneurs needed to experiment with new ways to connect people online and is just as critical for today's startups as it was for today's popular platforms when they launched.

FOSTA would destroy the careful policy balance struck in Section 230. By opening platforms to increased criminal and civil liability at both the federal and state levels for user-generated content, the bill would incentivize those platforms to over-censor their users. Since it would be difficult if not impossible for platforms, both large and small, to review every post individually for sex trafficking content (or to definitively know whether a piece of online content reflects a sex trafficking situation in the offline world), platforms would have little choice but to adopt overly restrictive content moderation practices-silencing legitimate voices in the process.

Your comments please...

Mike...

The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten, so build your teardrop with the best materials...

I ran a BBS in the 80's (yeah I'm old) long before we had protections. Attended many EFF seminars, end result was locking the board down, preventing private messaging, and requiring proof of user identity. Several other sysops closed theirs after reviewing some content on their systems.

End theme was "not worth the time to provide a free service for idiots that can cause me to go to jail for their stupidity."

Quote : "The bright side is that there's a strong chance this bill will run into trouble in the courts.”

Not being a Lawyer , just a trailer builder , I really have no idea of the effect on our e-communities , other than employing More Lawyers…who as congressman make these laws to seemingly generate more business for themselves …

And sites like this , that have little interest for such things criminal , I doubt it would be much concern … maybe except for those very few people that come here to make trouble ..

The FOSTA bill was designed to go after websites like Craigslist personals, backpage, and others that quite literally profit off of sex trafficking and prostitution. I can't in anyway see any reason why there would be any problems on here. This forum isn't geared to anything remotely close to those sites and if the occasion bot pops up delete them and ban them.

Yes, lots and lots of laws get "repurposed" by prosecutors when it suits them, far from the usage originally intended.

Trafficking itself is supposed to be limited tothird parties, travel across jurisdictions, and involuntary, deception or coercion involved. Now the term is used to prevent sex work in general, even when there are no victims involved.

Money laundering was supposed to be a tool for cracking down on narco, child porn, arms dealers, terrorism etc. Now mostly used for tax evasion, foreign corruption, politics get involved.

Anti-hacking laws the same, evolved so used to criminalize violating civil law user agreements, prevent publishing or even investigating system security weaknesses, reverse engineering for end-user benefits.

As democratic freedoms get more eroded, it will get harder and harder for citizens to resist trends toward greater and greater control over our lives. Not saying we're going police state fascist just yet, but that seems to be the direction if we don't stand up and assert our freedoms.

FOSTA is a poorly crafted piece of legislation. There is no excuse to pass bills that have built-in unintended consequences. Write to your Representative and give your Senator a piece of your mind too.

I for one am grateful for this forum and the work you put in to keep it in place. That being said I think you need to CYA. I would think about charging a membership fee and hiring someone to monitor the postings,and eliminate PM.

I vote for making the forum private, for members only. Many of the facebook forums screen people who ask to become members and they can be dropped immediately if any complaints or misconduct is found. I don't mind that.

The activity here has dropped off to a nice 1 to 2 pages a day; so, it's not as busy as it once was. I still like this site better than the teardrop facebook site because you can access information much easier. This one has a nice layout. Thanks, Mike, for making this available for us.

This law will be almost certainly challenged on Constitutional grounds and it will lose. A newspaper is not liable for opinions, as has been determined many times in the past by SCOUSA. Public BBS (forums like this) have long been given high protection status by the courts due to the freedom of speech issue.

That said, it never hurts to not only protect yourself, but to also lighten the load. You can have multiple moderators/admins. People you trust to help in control. You can make all postings controlled by moderators, meaning it doesn't show up until someone approves it. We don't have such a huge membership that moderating would be a big problem, and less so with multiple admins. Yes, that means posts won't show up immediately for most people, but even that is not a big deal in most cases.

We are a self-moderating group and the knowledge by all that things political/sexual/criminal are forbidden is built in. I love this group and will do my part in keeping it going.

daveesl77 wrote:We are a self-moderating group and the knowledge by all that things political/sexual/criminal are forbidden is built in. I love this group and will do my part in keeping it going.

dave

100% agree. I lurked for about two years before joining last September, read many of the past threads as far as they go, and the most controversy or disagreement I saw has to do with the size of wires.

On a selfish note, Shelly and I are just beginning the serious design of our teardrop and consider the advice and opinions offered here invaluable. I'd really hate to see it change, especially now.